


gap year

by orphan_account



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Gen, Lance (Voltron) is a Mess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-06
Updated: 2017-02-06
Packaged: 2018-09-22 09:31:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,432
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9601835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Lance finds himself.Turns out, he was right there all along.





	

Lance never planned to leave the Castle of Lions.

Planning would have meant thinking about it. Weighing the pros and cons. Considering the team’s future needs and steering them towards a situation where Lance could make an honourable exit. And Lance wasn’t that person, you know? He wasn’t some mastermind playing 4-D chess against the Galra Empire. He was just a guy with a worn out old dream and a shiny space gun and too many worries to count on one hand. 

No, Lance never _planned_ to leave the Castle of Lions. 

But if there was one talent Lance had, as a soldier, it was assessing a situation and coming up with a course of action on the fly. He could be patient, focus, and improvise. He knew how to spot the right time to pull the trigger. 

So when Lance came down with the Mumblepox and Matt Holt had to step in to pilot Blue and, holy shit, out came the ice ray, Lance acted without hesitation. 

He left his bayard on the seat of Blue’s cockpit, and he went. 

***

The first two months out were complete bullshit. 

Lance hadn’t wanted to know whether the team bothered looking for him. Hadn’t wanted to consider which was worse — Hunk being disappointed in him for leaving, or Hunk accepting that their time as best friends had ended. So he’d found the shittiest restaurant in the most disgusting quarter of the trade station they were parked on, kept his head down, and scrubbed dishes like his life depended on it. Which, uh, it did, seeing as how he had to pay his oxygen bill at the end of each day, even though he worked in a dank and airless pit. 

For a while Lance wondered if Blue would come for him. If she’d sense how greasy he felt at the end of each day and swoop down from the stars to liberate him, let him dive into the clean waters of her mind. If she’d insist that she needed him. 

Blue never did, though. And Lance couldn’t hold his (mad, desperate, _stupid_ ) hopes against her. 

After two months he figured his time in hiding was done. The Castle of Lions had long departed the station’s orbit, he had no idea what was going on in the galaxy, and his face was covered with so many pimples that any Galra searching for stray paladins probably took one look and decided he wasn’t human. 

The first three times he tried to talk his way into hitching closer to Earth, he got his ass kicked into the gutter. The fourth time, he ended up losing his last pair of pants in a game of Space Poker. The fifth time, he was getting better at Space Poker and also had a couple of juicy rumours to sell but that didn’t matter when the Captain saw his boyfriend staring a little too hard at Lance’s boxer-briefs.

The sixth time, Lance toned down the flirting a bit, and joked and charmed and gambled his way into a berth. 

***

The mercenary thing was a mistake. 

Or… maybe not a mistake, but a failure? 

Look, Lance might like to talk, but he wasn’t an English major. Or a Spanish one either. Who cared what the right word was? An unexpected and unwanted thing had happened which ended up with him kind of sort of becoming a mercenary. Wow cool case closed. 

It was a mistake, because Lance _knew_ he wasn’t cut out to be the best soldier, and his pride screamed that if he wasn’t going to be one of the best, he might as well move on. 

It was a failure, because he’d been doing so well at forgetting the feeling of recoil, the tension of a trigger, the feeling of doom that woke him up some nights in a cold sweat. 

But when your ship got boarded by pirates you kind of had to steal one of their guns and shoot them. That was like… a rule? Of not dying by pirate? And it turned out that some passengers had seen that, and being the-dude-who-shoots-pirates was apparently a lucrative and fast-growing field. Lance wouldn’t even need a graduate degree or anything. 

It would get him on whatever shady ship he wanted, heading vaguely earthways. 

So the mercenary thing stuck.

The worst part of all was that Lance loved it. He was halfway to Han-goddamn-Solo, of _course_ he loved it — having adventures with space babes, losing bets in bars, and being the best at everything because he never stuck around long enough to let people realize he sucked.

He’d left his family for this. He was the most selfish piece of shit in the universe. 

Lance guessed that was pretty Han Solo too. 

 

*** 

Lance heard about Voltron, sometimes. 

Mostly in the form of Imperial propaganda. Don’t trust those Voltron lions! They will use your planet as a litterbox!! Well, okay, nobody said that, but Lance figured it was the gist. He never paid much attention to it, aside from smearing thick black paint over his eyes to avoid facial recognition software. Propaganda always meant he was straying too close to Galra territory. 

Once in a while, though, someone would try to trade him some intel about them. A word about a victory. Some rumors about a defeat. People as well-travelled as Lance often made their living off of news as much as their sidearms. 

He liked to think he played it cool when he bargained.

Those someones could have haggled him down to his underpants, if they knew how much he cared. 

*** 

Getting closer to Earth was not the same thing as actually going to Earth. Nobody Lance knew who would fly him there had any business being within five systems of Lance’s family. 

So Lance circled the Sol sector like a sad puppy. 

Lance wasn’t proud of it. It was making him predictable, and he wasn’t always popular enough for that to be a good thing. Like, he had a lot of friends, but they weren’t so much friends as guys who knew guys, and there was always _someone_ in that great big beautiful network of interstellar douchebags who had a problem with Lance. He met a lot of people. He shot a lot of people. These things were bound to happen.

And their world, well, their world was getting smaller. More cramped. Every time the Galra lost a battle it meant they had more to prove. They were carving up systems by the week. 

***

The mercenary thing was a mistake, full stop.

Lance couldn’t remember why he’d learned to shoot way-back-when at the Garrison, where no one had believed in alien hostiles, but it wasn’t to put holes the heads of a pair of chicken guys who’d been trying to attack him for a seed sandwich. 

There’d been a time when he wasn’t this grubby, wild creature. When his food had been water and mystery goo instead of booze and mystery crunch. 

There’d been a time when he’d fought to save the universe. 

Lance kept it to himself for as long as he could stand it, until one day he stopped hearing the shitty Galra propaganda, stopped being asked for Voltron news, stopped having to think about his old crew at all. 

It took five favors, a rare flux capacitor, and a bar of platinum to buy Lance the location of the so-called ‘peace talks’ that were being carried out between Price Lotor and Princess Allura. It took a working knowledge of Parthian crime syndicates to get him inside the Prince’s citadel. 

 

***

Lance never planned to return to the Castle of Lions.

Planning would have meant thinking about it. Weighing the pros and cons. Considering the team’s future needs and steering himself towards a situation where they’d have no choice but to take him back. And Lance wasn’t that person, you know? He wasn’t some mastermind playing 4-D chess against the Galra Empire. He was just a guy with a sniper rifle, too-fond memories of people who never laughed at his jokes and, above all else, nothing to lose. 

No, Lance never _planned_ to return the Castle of Lions. 

But if there was one talent Lance had, as a soldier, it was assessing a situation and coming up with a course of action on the fly. He could be patient, focus, and improvise. He knew how to spot the right time to pull the trigger. 

He climbed to the highest rooftop in the neighborhood, waited twenty minutes for the Prince to lead Princess Allura onto a balcony, and fired.


End file.
